A Test of Wills - Charles Todd [76]
“I’m sorry—that wasn’t what I intended to—” He found himself apologizing quickly, a hand out as if to stop her from ringing the bell for Johnston.
Hamish stirred. “She’ll enchant ye, wait and see! Go while you can!”
But Rutledge paid him no heed. “Look at this from my point of view,” he went on. “So far, the best evidence I can find leads me to Mark Wilton. I don’t want to make a mistake, I don’t want to arrest him now and then have to let him go for lack of proof. Can you see what that could do to his life? Or yours, if you marry him, now or later. Chances are, you knew Charles Harris as well if not better than anyone. The man, not the soldier, not the landowner, not the employer. Help me find the Colonel’s killer! If you loved him at all.”
She stared at him, still very angry. But she hadn’t rung the bell. Instead, she walked with that long graceful stride toward the window, swinging around, making him turn as well to see her. “What is it you want, then? For me to damn someone else?”
“No. Just to help me see that last evening as clearly as I can.”
“I wasn’t there when the quarrel began!”
“But you can judge what might have happened. If I ask the right questions.”
She didn’t answer him, and he made himself think clearly, made himself consider what might have happened.
Three women. Three men. Catherine Tarrant, Lettice Wood, Sally Davenant. Charles Harris, Mark Wilton, and a German called Linden. He hadn’t found a link that satisfied him. And yet there were ties between them, of love and hate. Linden was dead. Harris was dead. And if Hickam’s testimony in court was damning enough, Wilton would be hanged. The men gone. All three of them.
Which in a way brought him back again to Catherine Tarrant….
“Is it possible,” he began slowly, “that, whatever they may have discussed just after you went up to your room, your guardian and Captain Wilton argued that night over Miss Tarrant? That somehow the subject of Miss Tarrant—or Linden, for that matter—came up after they’d finished the discussion of the wedding?”
The defensive barrier was there again. She answered curtly, “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about! Why should they’ve argued about Catherine?”
“Could the Colonel have warned the Captain that Catherine Tarrant still felt strongly about Linden’s death and was likely to do something rash? To harm one of them? To spoil the wedding, perhaps? Could the Captain have refused to hear anything said against her? Defended her, and made Harris very angry with him?”
“If Charles had been worried, he would have said something to me. But he didn’t—”
“But you didn’t go riding with him that morning. There was no opportunity to tell you what was on his mind.”
She opened her mouth to say something, and decided against it. Instead, she replied, “You’re chasing straws!”
“A witness saw them together, still arguing, that morning shortly before the Colonel died. If they weren’t arguing over the wedding, then over what? Or over whom?”
With her back to the windows, her eyes shadowed by the halo of her dark hair, she said, “You’re the policeman, aren’t you?”
“Then what about Mrs. Davenant?”
“Sally? What on earth does she have to do with anything?”
“She’s very fond of her cousin. Your guardian might have worried about that. Or conversely, Mark Wilton might have been jealous of the place Harris held in your life—”
Lettice turned to the flowers in the vase, her fingers moving over them as if she were blind and depended on touch to know what varieties were there. “If Mark had wanted to marry Sally, he could have done it any time these last eight years. When he had leave during the war, she went to London to meet him. He’s fond of her, of course he is. He’s fond of Catherine Tarrant, as well. As for Charles, Mark knows how I feel—felt—about him.” She bit her lip. “No, feel. I won’t put it in the past tense, as if everything stopped with his death! As if you stop caring, stop giving someone a place in your